


Overjoyed

by americanjedi



Series: Bright Bastille [1]
Category: Bastille (Music Videos), Bright (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, And The Other Magic Cops, Chicago, Fanfic is when you love something so much you try to fix it, Gen, Let's Party Like Its 1998, Looking at the Butts of the Magic Task Force, Magic, Magic Cops, Not Beta Read, Not RPF, OCs galore, Overjoyed Music Video, Prostitution, Secret Societies, Slandering the Shield of Light, Taking a scrap of canon information and running with it, Throwing Rocks at the Inferni, Tutelaries, Very Alternate Universe, Very Professional Friends, arizona iced tea, no underage prostituion, too many tags
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 00:39:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15206993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/americanjedi/pseuds/americanjedi
Summary: When magic is illegal, magic cops (no, theothermagic cops) try to get Brights safe and trained before the Magic Task Force, the Inferni, or the Shield of Light can get a hold of them.  There's a Bright getting herself noticed in Chicago and where there's a Bright, there's trouble.  Tutelary Felix is the bluebird on her shoulder, Tutelary Shosa has the Will to survive, and Chicago is a mother hen with blood on her wings.They hear you calling in the dead of night, so let's get AU with Overjoyed - an exploration of Bastille music videos in the Bright universe.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have a habit of writing AUs, but this might be the AU-est I've ever gotten. That seems to be kind of okay in this fandom though? I saw the Bastille music video for Bright - because I'm watching everything Bright I can right now - and I love the Bastille music videos so I thought why not combine the two into a Bright series exploring how the magical world might react to being illegal. I should also note that this isn't beta'd and that this isn't RPF. 
> 
> My life is a bit hectic right now, but I'll try to reply to comments as best as I can. I hope you enjoy!

There was a Bright somewhere in Chicago. Someone glowing and verdant, someone tired and dreamy. Felix wasn’t even sure if they knew they were doing magic, or if it was one of those sudden onslaught things that happened sometimes. Could be either, could be both. 

He looked over at Shosa, whose golden eyes were fixed securely on the road in front of her. The sky was fading from purple to black, from gaudiness to quietude. Her hands were relaxed on the wheel, her skin dappled in deep teal and tan, her mouth an easy, thoughtful line. The fine feminine points of her ears twitched as he stirred, otherwise she seemed unbothered. She could go for ages, just pushing forward like that. It might be all the meditation she did. It was nice to be partnered with an orc again, it took him back to his days among the _vigile_. 

By habit, Felix had woke in an instant with a blink open of his eyes, aware and alert, even as he stayed curled up in his small patch of comfort. It was too pleasant to speak. The radio murmured in the background, a low male voice with that ogre twang reading the news between songs. _“I hope all of you are enjoying the summer warmth. Make sure to drop by Wrigley Field before the summer passes you by. Before we get to a track I think you’ll enjoy from the Black Eyed Peas, the brand new band that is going some serious places, we’ve got the news for you. The FDA has approved a new wonder drug called Viagra - the drug you don’t want to tell your mom about just in time for our next bit of news. New information has come forward concerning the relationship between current President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky-”_

He detangled an arm to change the station to another in the middle of an Alanis Morissette song. Everything on TV and everything on the radio was about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. He was tired of it. Clinton wasn’t the first leader to have a convenient fling with someone of dependent rank and he wouldn’t be the last. 

The song ended and the gentleman DJ traded off to a woman who talked in golf voice and cued up Madonna.

He blinked out into the half dark for a moment before easing his seat upright again. He’d been using his coat as a blanket, he watched it fall into his lap lining up. The red satin had a bit of the shine of magic about it, stitched in with navy thread. He touched it as he looked out over the fields of green, the line of light drawn in front of them by the headlights against the coming of the dark. The magic caught in him, sparking and spreading until his eyes shone cobalt for a moment in the side view mirror before fading back to a normal hue. The wards on the car felt secure as well as the ones floating over them in the ether, no one had tried to look them up or search for them. Shosa’s gaze drifted sideways to him, considering.

“How’s your arm?”

He rotated his arm in the joint, flexing it up and down a few times. “A little stiff, but fine. The break finished healing while I was asleep.”

“Next time we come face to face with an Inferni coven, maybe you shouldn’t punch one of them in the face and hope for the best.”

“It was better that I take the hit,” he told her, his eyes set on the white triangle mark on his forearm among all the little burn scars that flashed like mica in the half light. It flexed and jumped with the clench and release of his fist. “You’re the better fighter. It’s just resource management.”

“You’re not a resource.”

He looked at the countryside, the light of Chicago’s suburbs in the distance. Too far away for clarity, close enough for its presence to be known. “I know I’m not, I’m also not as skilled a fighter as you are. If one of us was to have their bell rung, I might as well be the belfry.”

She huffed at him, a sound as amused as it was annoyed. “That’s such a clever point I might blow you a kiss.”

“You wouldn’t! I’m injured.”

“Mawah!” she kissed against her fingers and smacked him in the leg with it. “You’re fine.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. “Well, Mwah!” He kissed into his palm and whacked her in the arm.

“I’m driving!”

“You started it!”

“And I’ll finish it!” she said and swung a kiss at his face, a rookie mistake - she really must have been tired.

“Ow!” bluffed, covering his face with his hands, wincing his eyes closed.

“Oh Felix! Are you okay?” she said, leaning in too close. 

He smooched both his hands and patted them on her cheeks. “Double kiss. My technique is too powerful.”

She blinked at him in surprise for a moment before snorting out a laugh. “I give, you win this round. Next time I’ll be merciless.”

He curled back up in his seat in victory. “You’ll try. How far are we?” he asked. He arranged his coat to tease the edge of the get well card out of his pocket so the top of the yellow happy face peeked out. There was a pale patch where he’d been rubbing his thumb on the paper.

“An hour and change give or take.”

He pushed the card back into his pocket again. “Do you want me to drive?”

She looked at him, her eyes golden from the headlights. “Sure. Walk around first, get your blood pumping. We should check to see if we can’t locate the Bright again.”

“With our powers combined, we’ve got to see something,” Felix told her. He unfolded his limbs to get himself better upright.

She pulled over in a regulation perfect curve. Her hands moved with a comforting process, reliable in its solidness. Gear shift, handbrake, keys, doors, headlights. This time she left the door to their car open so it stood out in an exclamation mark, a defensive wall of weight and presence in the dark. He clattered out onto the grass at the side of the road, leaving his limbs to sort themselves out. There was a whole ditch of thick wild grass and wildflowers that clumped together tight as carpeting. 

Pushing his hands into it, he waved the stalks so little bugs flew up in arcs and spirals. He laughed at their scattering and then settling again an inch to the left. Even in the warm evening air the grass was soft and cool against his hands. He felt the glide of their stems against the pads of his fingers, the mat of shed blades of glass down at the root. Things got so heavy sometimes, burnt out bodies covered in dark veins and fanatics foaming and screaming dark threats. It could make someone lock up, could fill someone’s head. It was good to remind himself this was why he kept on. Wild grass in warm evenings. The putter and persistence of life. Bugs counted out the measure of their days in a meager handful and still made the world a better place for living there.

He picked a little sprig of blue flowers off a stem and handed it to Shosa. “Thanks,” she laughed.

Grinning, he ran through the grass, making crickets and mice skitter and jump away. He laughed at them, at the warm air on his bare arms, the tug of the grass pulling against his jeans. On the asphalt, Shosa was performing controlled stretches, her arms and legs and body making curves and lines and shapes. 

A slither of scales caught the light of the headlight between blades of grass, and he leapt sideways into a cartwheel, onto the road where there were less snakes and more visibility.

Shosa’s laughter was deep and musical, catching her leaning forward into a lunging pose with her elbow propped on her knee.

“There was a snake!” he said. He did a second and third cartwheel, the asphalt rough and hot under his hands. “There was a snake!”

“Did you-” she started, and then had to stop and laugh some more. He landed in a crouch, blinking at her. “Did you get bit?”

“No!” he told her. “I used an evasive maneuver.”

She blasted out a laugh, like a sneeze. “I guess you did. I must be more tired than I thought.”

“Maybe I’m just that funny.” He grinned up at her.

“No,” she said, straightening up and shaking out her limbs. “You’re not.”

“Ow,” he told her, clutching his chest and falling down backwards. “You killed me.”

“Come on, dead man. We have a Bright to-” She went quiet, her body tense and ready, looking somewhere over him.

He felt his muscles tense from his belly outward, his hand loosely curling next him. He turned his head in a careful rotation. There was a young lady, blond hair in loose waves covering her face, wearing loose soft pajamas in a pale yellow covered in daisies. Her hands hung loose at her sides, her bare feet still and set on the pavement. She was so still he couldn’t tell if she was breathing. Something was wrong, his body prickled with magic. Was she hurt? Possessed? 

Reaching out with his magic, he danced his mind across hers, letting her feel his concern, his desire to help her. Her intentions were unreadable, neither malicious nor actively friendly. Her thoughts were nearly indecipherable to him in their simplicity, a world held in a six worded poem in a language too dreamy to translate. Her feelings floated like flower petals in the wind. He could tell she was searching for something and that she wasn’t possessed, but didn’t feel comfortable trying to push further. If she was under a spell he could seriously hurt her.

“We came to help you,” he told her. “We traveled all this way to protect you. Are you alright?”

“Felix,” Shosa said. “Don’t touch her.”

He looked at the young lady, eyes cataloguing clean bare feet and pink nails and dry skin and the stillness of her body. She hadn’t walked anywhere down the road with clean feet and no sweat. “She’s not breathing.”

“Something’s going on.”

“Yeah, really?”

“Shut up.”

“Okay, I don’t want to move and scare her, but if I could I’d be blowing you a kiss.”

The young lady let out a soft huff, her hands drifting at her side like willow branches in the wind. A fine tremor moved through her fingertips, up the delicate mechanism of her wrists, up the soft lines of her arms to her shoulders. They began to hitch, her mouth open and soundless. A sympathetic sound tore out of him, small and pained.

“Felix.” Shosa’s voice was tense with warning.

The young lady lowered herself in slow increments. Her eyes looked a bluish gray, barely open, her lips were pale and slack. Her soft bare knees landed on the asphalt without a wince, almost without feeling. She folded down sideways, her head resting on his chest, her hand tucking up under her cheek so her knuckles pressed to her pale lips. His arms curled around her on instinct, trying to offer some comfort to the jagged trembling of her body. She was neither warm nor cold. If he thought about it too much he lost the weight of her, the feel of his hands on her shoulder and back. Things made a lot more sense now, why she kept showing up as being in multiple places at once.

“Where are you, _anaticula?_ We can help you protect yourself. We’re worried about you.”

Petals scattered against the road, shoring up against his side, rolling over her in a wave.

“Felix?” Shosa said.

“She’s dreamwalking. Hm, aren’t you, _anaticula?_ Just going on a little dream walk. Having a bit of a ramble?”

“That takes a spell,” Shosa moved forward on silent feet. “The kind of spell that takes a wand or a spell book.”

“Little one,” Felix said. “Have you found a strange book? Have you found something that wants you to read it? That wants you to do things for it?”

Her hand spasmed against her mouth, her eyes going so wide the white shone around them. As painful as the blankness had been, this sudden flip-switch fear felt worse.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Shosa said, she crouched down the headlights. The light caught the linen of her blouse and made it glow under the red stitched across it. “Little one, we’re coming to help you. Can you tell us where you are?”

The girl covered her face with her hands, one after the other, curling her knees against the side of his thigh. The very image of a child ashamed.

“We can help you with whatever problem you’ve found yourself in,” Shosa told her. “You do not need to fear or be ashamed. Whatever you have done, we will help you find a solution. Our only concern is your safety.”

One hand reached, young and not young, for Shosa’s face. The pads of her fingers looked smooth as a blank page. And then Felix was left holding an armful of flower blossoms.

“The ground’s actually getting quite cold now,” he told Shosa. The Bright was gone without a word without a hint, with only a face to go by. A child who was in trouble, and hurt, and if her reaction was anything to go by, a child who was being exploited. One breath in, then one breath out, and then Felix sat up. He pressed his hands to his chest, trapping the flower petals between his palms and his shirt.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter isn't betaed. I love Felix, but sweetheart needs to stop talking and thinking and do something more exciting.

Even knowing that the Bright had just returned to her body from her dreamwalk, her sudden disappearance sent a flash of desperate panic through him. He held the petals she had left behind to his chest, terrified of bruising them. “Please tell me you have a bag or a box or something,” he told Shosa.

Shosa pulled a plastic evidence bag from her pocket and held it open for him. “I grabbed a bunch from that Magic Task Force agent we ran into in Seattle.”

Taking care not to crush them, he slid as many petals in as he could. When he had tucked in the goodly handful he had saved he stopped, paused, breathed again. Between Shosa’s eyes, a furrow was starting up. “We need to contact _Chieftain_ Tony and update him. It takes too long to recharge a search, I want all the information we can get before we try again.”

They stood together, Felix reaching into his pocket for his scrying glass. The piece of rectangular glass was more utilitarian than the mirrored compact that Shosa carried. While it was just big enough to be awkward to carry, it was also big enough to get a decent look at things. It was heavier than it looked like it should be where he held it in his hand.

He brought it to his mouth, breathing on it so it fogged a bluish grey. _“Exsultans._ ”

He was treated to a view of a white fog, a rusty voice rumbling, “Hail and well met.”

Moving the glass he hovered it over first his and then Shosa’s triangle tattoo.

There was a flick of a thumb and Prefect Tony’s huge face filled their screen. Their leader and advisor and all around boss had permanent creases of stress on his face. His pale jade eyes full of a frantic energy bellied by the heaviness of his cheeks; the weighted features of a man who wore himself out like a pair of shoes and had lived a life of cheap take out and hard coffee. “Have you found the Bright already?”

“That would be toppers,” Felix said, his voice slinging out razor sharp. He stopped and pressed his lips together. “No.” He tried again. “Not exactly. She appeared in front of us in the road and then disappeared.”

Tony raised his bushy eyebrows. They were like little scrub brushes, he had to have the cleanest forehead with all the raising and lowering he did with them.

“The Bright was dreamwalking,” Shosa explained. “She seems to realize something is up. She appeared right in front of us a hundred miles outside of Chicago.”

Tony’s creased face furrowed further, there was the sound of paper shifting around. “If it was a wand we would be mediating a coven turf war right now, so let’s assume it’s not that.”

“Safe to judge it’s a spellbook,” Felix agreed, tugging his forelock in apology for his earlier tone.

“Well, then.” Tony’s face turned, eyes going back and forth as he read something. His hand moved as though he was shifting through another scrying glass for the information. It was a wonder mundane cops got anything done with their clunky computers even slower paper filing systems instead of just using a secure scrying glass. “We have four reported missing spellbooks, none in North America, assuming of course it’s not an ancient lost book that’s resurfacing again. With our luck that’s exactly what it is. I’ll have Tutelary Henutsen ask around the covens, you should go visit her anyway when you arrive. Until we know what the book is, be careful. Who knows what’s in that book. It could have put anything in her brain.”

“She’s just a young person,” Felix said. Hands clenching in his pockets, he felt his shoulders come up around his ears. “She just feels really young and kind of scared.”

“We all know how dangerous scared people can be. We don’t need another Inquisition cutting down our ranks, not with the escalation in Inferni activity and two years to stop some kind of Y2K apocalypse. Find the Bright, erase the memory of any witnesses - anyone who so much as says two words to you, and connect her with someone who can teach her some control.”

Shosa looked at Felix out of the corner of her eye.

“Everyone’s memory? Isn’t that a bit extravagant? I’ll have to buy jars for all the memories,” Felix joked, if more because his particular, very Blue Coven skillset tended to make Shosa uncomfortable.

“Then buy new jars,” Tony told them. “We know how often one word said in passing by someone who didn't realize what they were saying broke the case. The same is true for the other side. What do you think the Inferni could do with a spellbook that had dreamwalking spells in it? You think they'd jump into people's minds to throw them a tea party? And I’m absolutely not helping to find the body of some kid with Blue Magic that died because the Shield of Light tried to get them to do offensive magic, or some Green Magic child whose brain melted when they made them try to tell the future.” He hissed a wet breath out through his thick lips.

Felix felt furrow form between his eyes as though it had been plowed there. “Delina found the Chan boy.”

“There was nothing left of the Chan boy. Forensics is magicking together a Poppet so his parents will have something to bury.”

Rage at the waste flared up inside him so hot Shosa had to take his scrying glass from his shaking hands. The Shield of Light was meant to protect people, that's why Jirak had formed it. Someone to take the blow, someone to close ranks so no one would be alone. The new Shield was obscene, they had completely forgotten themselves.

She cleared her throat, uncomfortable at the news and his display. “On a similar note. We know Analytics is pretty busy trying to track down the end of the world, but could you spare a Seer to see what they could Foresee for this Bright?” Shosa leaned in, shifting from foot to foot. “We’ve been struggling to find her location and her behavior implies she’s being used in some way to do something she doesn’t believe in. Dreamwalking could answer why she’s showing up as being in two places at once on the scrying glass. Or it could be she’s employing a protection spell. If she doesn’t know any better and she’s scared of something she may have just been trying things.”

“She created the flower petals when she dream walked,” Felix came in with immediate support, voice still trembling. “We could send them in.”

Tony’s brows furrowed. “I can do you one better. There’s a small group of the Cult of Ra in Chicago. They have Seers keener than anything we’ve got. It would pay to see if you can get them to play ball. Either way, stay sharp. If there’s a child being exploited out there I want her somewhere safe and I want her there immediately.”

Felix grimaced. “We’re right behind you, _Prefect._ ”

He must have been passed the keys, must have gotten in the driver’s side, and put on his seat belt. He must have driven them in, because when he blinked his way out of the panic attack he had muffled under his professionalism they were driving down a city street.

Chicago was beautiful at night. It made no pretense at timidity. The veil it dragged over itself was the gauziest of lace built of iron and machinery. There was a heavy blood magic in the city from the sacrifices made by Red Coven Brights behind the sliding doors of meat packing plants. Quiet words whispered in prayer and the slide of a knife mixed with Old Magic passed in secret from coven to coven sunk into the soil here. The Lakes, small seas, accepted the bodies thrown in them like small gods – their freezing mouths stuck open wide.

Magic made in secret had turned the city into a brooding hen over her chicks, hiding them from the view of those who would use them or separate them from her loving embrace. One didn’t take a Bright out of Chicago, one aligned them with a coven and brought them under the wing. Tutelaries weren’t summoned to The Windy City, they approached with care and a wide swath of reverence. Next to him, Shosa looked relaxed. Her magic would be at full strength here, her already impressive will magnified.

Henutsen was the stationed Tutelary of Chicago, an ancient priestess with no patience for his nonsense. Shosa would be the one to talk to her while Felix minded the car. Shosa was a shaman of impressive power and he was a bit too energetic for Henutsen to put up with.

Standing in a fenced in parking lot, Felix tapped his fingers against the door of their car. The ward he’d wrapped around the metal pinged in sympathy against his hands. Cities weren’t dark the way they used to be at night. The dichotomy between day and night, between sun and moon was purely something for the poets and timesheets. Light burned from streetlights, from windows, and skyscrapers. The sky above was stuck in the purple of twilight.

It was amazing to see, in his time it would have been incomprehensible to blot out the stars with the light of man. He’d walked his paces in a night so dark he could see the veins behind his eyes like streaks of lightning, a candle seemed to burn as bright as a small sun. Now he bore witness to the slow death of night, the faltering of an old man past his prime.

Behind him the door to the apartment complex opened and closed, a couple of Green Coven members with hair so acid bright it hurt to look at, and big boots clomped past him. Their eyes burned hot with wild magic, their laughter a little too high strung behind their hands. They looked like they had been for blood and had tree burls for hearts. They could have been Brights or just druids, their magic grew so wild it was impossible to tell. They shot a rune of greeting at him, a well-meaning explosion the color of a new leaf so he rolled the wheel of a cobalt well wish over his knuckles in response. They laughed harder behind their hands, their nails and eyelids painted pink and green and black.

“Who’s tutelary are you?” the shorter of the two asked.

“The vigiles,” Felix told them.

“Where are they?”

“Buried in the ground.” He tucked one foot behind the other. “Time and history got them in the end.”

“That’s tough, man,” the taller said. “Like sands through an hourglass, am I right?”

Felix snorted out a laugh. It was sweet of him to try to be comforting.

“Your friend is fighting with our tutelary.”

“Is she?” 

The short one snorted. “She seems like the sort of person to take things too serious. People who take things too serious are always fighting.”

“Some people think fighting is the only way to stay alive,” the tall one spoke like the end of a spell.

“Our tutelary doesn’t want you here. She believes you’ll make the city mad. The beast shudders, her feathers are all in a ruffle. She doesn’t mind us. We’re leaves and mistletoe, we’re moss and vines growing on the side of her edifice.”

“Moss and vines still need something to grow on,” Felix said.

“We have interest in the edifice,” the short one allowed. “We can grow anywhere.”

“What is the position of the Green coven of Chicago?”

“Don’t get us all killed,” said the tall one.

The short one rolled their eyes. “You’re a Blue Bright, your power is in the heart, what makes people themselves and not someone else. Perhaps, since that’s where your power lies you should follow your heart to where it wants to go.”

“Aren’t you lot meant to be straightforward?” Felix asked them.

They bent their heads together, laughing behind their hands, and disappeared into the shadows between one breath and the next, Chicago rustling up like a mother hen around them. He huffed out a laugh at them.

There was something soothing about the mind of Green Brights, the wild openness of their intentions - fearing little and exploring much. Green Brights could be trouble because they liked to see what would happen, but they were good folk usually. It was unusual for them to be so cryptic. Shosa came out shortly after the two disappeared, half jogging down the steps before coming to a short stop. Her Will moved in front of her like a snow plow, cutting a wedge of porch light into the shadow.

There would be a yes or a no and they'd have to abide by it.

Well, Shosa would abide by it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The buddy cops do some scrying, talk about geese. No beta and slow plot.

Shosa’s body was tense, her eyes sweeping back and forth. There was a slight glow around her, an afterimage glowing iron hot.

“You know,” Felix told Shosa, “hypervigilance is a thing.”

Feet braced apart on the apartment stoop, she stood scanning over the parking lot. “There were a couple Green Druids that were eavesdropping,” she said, “They walked out this way.”

“I saw them. They disappeared into the shadows, they either are off somewhere or they’re hanging around to see what we say to each other. They had some cryptic advice and some plant based metaphors to deliver.”

“So about what they always have to offer.” Her nostrils flared, “My head’s still full of that incense Henutsen uses, I can't smell if they're still here.”

“It's fine, Shosa.” It was always best to use logic to help get her out of the battle ready headspace she fell into. “We're not doing anything wrong, we’re doing our duty. We don't need to hide anything. Even if the local Green coven got a hold of the book - if there even is a book, what are they going to do? They're going to satisfy their curiosity, get what they can from it, and then hand it off to whoever. They're just people.”

She let out a rumbling huff at him, he was getting hits off her of concern and that buzzy watchfulness that made his sinuses hurt. It must have been worse for her.

“That’s an irresponsible way to view things.”

He looked at her. Breathed in and out, reached out to her with his mind.

“Stop that,” she rebuffed him with a fraternal snap, all bark and no bite. All at once her mind was a red, red wall, too high to climb, too broad to go around. She was soaking up the magic here like a sponge. “Don’t poke around in my head.”

He folded his Presence up into himself. “That’s not how it works, Shosa. Not people and not the world. Not everything can be controlled. All you can do is flow with what you’ve got.”

That wasn’t a popular opinion with Shosa. Not a surprise, she was the Reddest Bright he knew. She gave him one of those quelling looks that rolled right off his back. “Henutsen will get some of the petals to the Cult of Ra. No one’s told her about a lost spell book, but she’ll start looking into it. We have full clearance from the covens to roam the city.” She took a moment to breathe, to calm herself. “She was less cooperative than I hoped.”

“But she cooperated.”

“Having a Bright wandering around doing magic is bad for everyone. She’s too wise to reject assistance.” She headed over to the car, unlocking it and tossing the keys across the hood to him so he could get to their kit in the trunk. She couldn’t just leave him the keys of course, what sense would that make?

“So we’re all clear to run havok?”

The corner of her mouth caught up in a smile. “We will when we find out who’s got the girl so upset.”

He threw down a sigil around them to obscure what they were doing. Who knew what people would perceive, it just wouldn’t be them performing magic. He popped the trunk with a twist of the key, pulling out the packet they'd been using to try and scry. Among the folded and refolded, marked and remarked, papers sat the hard shape of the crystal and its chain. It poured out into his hand as Shosa tilted the folder over. Using her elbow, Shosa closed the trunk, then spread the map over it. If they had a Yellow Bright to scry for them, that would be ideal; until such a date as a Yellow Bright became available Felix's Blue magic would have to do. Normally he would be drowning in confidence, more than sure of his scrying ability, but he had been searching for this young lady without success for over a week.

The map itself was a cacophony of marks. Circles and lines and dates intermingled with street names and the winding line of Chicago’s waterways. Sooner rather than later they would need to invest in a new map. This one was reaching levels of unreadable.

"It'll work this time, now that we have the petals," Shosa told him.

He paused, the crystal's chain pooled in his hand. It felt warm from sitting in the trunk. “We’ll definitely be able to do better than we have,” he allowed. 

He didn’t know if it would make that much difference. He couldn’t not try, he just didn’t know if they should get their hopes up. His hand flexed around the crystal. He had used it plenty of times, it accepted his power as though it were the natural order of things. Unfortunately, Blue magic wasn't about belief or willpower. Matters of the heart were less and more fickle.

With the care of a coroner she extracted a petal from her bag and pressed it to the heart of his palm so he could hold it in place with a fingertip. He wrapped the end of the chain around his left ring finger, then up over the back of his knuckles. “Get ready. I can’t control how fast it moves.” 

It spun, once twice. He took a breath to center himself as Shosa got her highlighter uncapped and at the ready. “Evoco invenio.” 

The crystal circled around to hit Halstred Street before it swung up toward Webster, creased the paper on its way to Garfield Park, then Lincoln Park.

Shosa leaned toward him, her weight soothing against his shoulder. The crystal made a final spin and ended up swinging back and forth between the two ends of Goose Island.

The two of them looked down at the swinging crystal, on track as if it was magnetized. "Goose Island sounds fun. Geese are pretty rad."

"Geese are psychotic,” Shosa said.

"Maybe misunderstood."

"Geese and I understand each other just fine," she told him. "You're just too kind."

"We have a bigger problem than the nature of geese. Our fail proof petal plan failed." As he suspected it would.

"Nothing ever fails completely. It still gave us plenty of information. Look, the crystal keeps swinging between two points that are the junction of running water." She circled the points with her highlighter. "Its pretty advanced considering what we're assuming of our Bright friend, but using crossroads or confluxes is a classic spell of protection and obfuscation."

He remembered the Bright's quiet trembling. "That takes some pretty intense magic."

"The Brights in Bordeaux use it."

"Bordeaux is full of Blue magic, it's practically one giant protection spell. Chicago is drowning in Old Blood Red magic. I don't think a new Bright could convince the city to do anything for them."

"And yet," she said. 

He watched the sway of the crystal. "And yet," he agreed. "It's still the place where two waters meet."

"Maybe she doesn't have anything to do with it, maybe its the city."

"If it is the city hiding her," Felix said, "intentionally or unintentionally, then we use the city to find her again."

“You have an idea of something.” Shosa leaned back to consider him.

He looked at her out of the corner of his eyes and then away again. “You won’t like it.”

“I’ll get over myself.”

Opened the car door, he leaned against the iron frame, his wards flashed blue where his hand brushed them. “I’ll tell you in the car.”

Few things were as satisfying as closing a car door at the same time as one’s partner. The synchronicity of movement was a balm to the soul. He adjusted the seat for his too long legs and flipped on the headlights, gas looked a bit below half - an easy problem to fix. 

"With the Bright, we're talking some form of exploitation, right?" Felix said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.

She considered him, her gaze recentered into something calm. "Yes, some form of exploitation. It was clear enough she felt she should be ashamed of something she felt pressured to do. If she’s dreamwalking, chances are good she’s a Blue or Yellow Bright. It could be anything, cheating at cards, conjobs, identity theft." She looked at him. “You seem to have an idea though.” 

He shifted into gear, side mirror, rear view, other side, reverse. She watched him watch, gave him the room to speak at his own pace. Perhaps too much room, give him enough rope and he was liable to get tangled up in it. "We’ve established that it's probably something illegal. I’m fairly sure, given our brief instructive interaction that it’s some form of prostitution."

A red intensity came off of Shosa in a wave. "You sure?"

He looked sideways at her, then shifted his gaze to watch the parking lot get smaller in their rear view mirror. He felt the inside of his jacket flair in response to his distress. All knowledge betrayed the learning of it, some knowledge betrayed more than others. 

"She looked, what, nineteen? Twenty? I’d stretch it to twenty one if I had too, but I'd be right surprised about it. And yet she dressed like someone just out of childhood, she presented herself as someone even younger. Car thieves generally don't try to cling to their childlike innocence in that way, don't try to hide from growing up quite so vigorously. Gamblers aren’t that hungry to hold to their youth. Her mind is running back from her present into a time when she was different, when things were simpler. It’s just a lot of little things."

“How do we even find her then? Would there be some sort of weird red light districts?”

“Always,” Felix told her. “Hopefully they don’t have her working for elves. She’ll be secreted away in some club. If she’s working the streets we can find her, extract her easily.”

“I’d like to avoid as much bloodshed as possible.”

His hands tightened on the wheel as he snuck as sharp look at her. “I’d thought you’d be all vengeance to the wicked about this.”

“Violence is the last effort of the desperate. It is worth avoiding if there is time or choice enough for anything else. And the girl has gone through enough." Her presence stood as a bulwark in the dark, she looked out the window to spare him a little of her innate force of will. Yellow lights cast their glow over her so her eyes caught like hot irons, the set of her mouth like the law of decency between her fangs. "Magic or not, spellbook or not, we need to concentrate on getting her out of her situation."

"Push comes to shove, with our powers combined we could destroy the spellbook." Felix fixed his eyes on the road in front of him. White knuckles flexed like a mountain range across the top of the wheel as he spoke. "Suddenly, a lot of our problems are solved as well as the girl's."

"Tony won't like the loss of a spellbook, the covens will like it even less.” Her voice tuned toward consideration, slow and tilted up at the corners.

"It's just a book.”

"It could be irreplaceable."

The burst of anger that flared where his heart was meant to be was as unnecessary as it was unavoidable. "The girl is irreplaceable. There will always be new spellbooks, new spells, new secrets. She's the only her in the world. The only her that will ever be." 

In the street lights, in the shadow of steel and glass, the rumble of the street - of the beast that was Chicago lumbering forward in all its Old Magic maternity - Felix could not avoid awareness that they were interlopers. That their power was bound in by law and hospitality.

"Look," Felix tried again. "Our job is to keep people safe from dangerous magic and to keep magic safe from dangerous people. By my humble calculations, would you say destroying the spellbook would keep us from doing either of those things?"

Her knuckles tapped against the car window for a moment. "No, it doesn't keep us from doing either of those things. It would also take a lot of the politics out of the whole affair. Could remove the need for a brute force approach. Simplify things quite a bit. And a very Blue thing for you to suggest. One look at a sad child and you're giving barely any thought to blowing up priceless artifacts. No wonder they don't let Blue Brights out on their own."

"Our goal should be to preserve it," he allowed. "But never at risk to the girl. Never at risk to the victims."

“Time to apply some good old fashioned detective work then, clues, interviews, a bit of patrolling.”

“Getting threatened by good old fashioned Chicago mobsters,” Felix grinned at her.

“I’d be fine with skipping that last part.”

“That’s because you’re a party pooper. I’ll have to make do with the geese of Goose Island.”

Shosa settled back in her seat, tipping her head back, her eyes closed. “Sounds good to me. It could be a spell giving us a false location, or she could be taking advantage of some magical geography and is hiding between the two points.”

“Do you want me to put the radio on to help you sleep?”

“I’m fine.”

“Then sleep, you’ll need your rest to fight the geese.” Felix watched her slump down in her seat, tip her eyes closed with her mouth curled into the small familiarity of a smile then softened into its serious relaxed line.


	4. Chapter 4

Shosa was that: serious. She took things seriously. Nothing was ever half done or half measures. Felix, he thought, and wondered, he philosophized and was flexible. Everything in context and every context flavored with kindness. He was flowing water, a swell of love, a burst of laughter on the wind. He could also be concrete though, and he had a concrete idea about how to find the girl. Shosa wouldn’t like it though, she really wouldn’t like it.

It would be better to grab the low hanging fruit first. Better to check the stretch between the Island and the Park first before asking questions of witnesses and start pulling memories. Shosa's low breathing calmed him on the way to Goose Island. Chicago ebbed against him, a great red tongue worrying at a tooth. As soon as they crossed the bridge he could feel the city laughing at them. He couldn't see a single goose and it wasn't what he was expecting at all when he saw the word _island_.

The island was stuffed full of buildings and smog. It hung to the ground in front of them like the city’s own low laughter. The metal and concrete and brick crouched down in the ground, the air hot around it from a day of feeding the industrial complex.

“Do you think it's called Goose Island because like a goose, its terrible?” Shosa asked.

"I think we could spend days searching the hidey holes of the island and not find her, if she's even here at all."

"How long would it take you to search the whole island magically?" Shosa looked over at him.

He made a helpless gesture. "I don't know, how long do you want me to sleep afterward? I have limits to what I can do."

"Then I'll do it," Shosa said. "We have to be certain of the place."

Rolling back from his heels to the balls of his feet, he slipped his hands in his pockets. He tried to hide his relief. “Are you going showy or subtle?”

“Showy. I’m going to need a island wide obscurity ward.”

“Oh! Fun!” He considered the building around them to do some mental calculation. Still, it was something he could do without burning his energy. Shields and wards were old hat, it didn’t take complex intent. .“I’ll need something a little more than a sigil. I can stack a couple things together. I guess you’d like the whole island.”

She smiled at him, looked at him askanse with her eyes glowing a warm red.

Now was the time of the end of philosophy, now was the time when his body came alive with truth. It was the momentum of his body held still, it was the softness of his clothes against his skin, the smell of smoke, the yellow light of the security lights, the blue glow from his fingertips. Stepping forward, he swung his spread up through the air. The crystals against his skin glowed cobalt and navy in turn.

All a sigil was was a word put to work. Felix knew many words, and did his best to make them drip with meaning. His heart felt too big in his chest, a bright thumping thing behind the cage of his ribs. He looked at Shosa and let himself fall into the elation of affection, that special fondness where every imperfection made one love all the more. It flooded his system, pulled him up on his toes, his body a curving line, his face tilted up to the stars.

The sigils he made looped around his fingers and the crystals pressed to his skin spun out blocky capital letters, solid Latin symbols of words he felt in his heart. He flung them up in the air, letting them lock together in a blue latticework above Goose Island. The smog lost some of its malice. The crowded buildings picked up whimsy under the blue light. They took on the curious calm of a child at bedtime in the space between the bedtime story and sleep.

“We’re clear,” Felix said, hopping toe to heel to toe to heel to a little bit of moonwalking. “No one can see the hoodoo that you do.” 

Shosa lifted her hand, flexing. What had she need for a wand when she had her Will, it served as her wand, her sword. Red light flowed over her, liquid and sparking, her hand glowed bright as a hot iron. The pavement shuddered under her feet, shuffling like the side of a sleeping dog. _"Oko."_

The island shuddered, the very land shifting to obey her word. Red flowed out from her in ripples of light. It thrummed through the island until it cast up against the blue dome of the sky; flashing light up against the cogs and shapes and ancient words orbiting each other. 

Her influence flowed out around her, the buildings sorting the bricks open and closed to bare their contents to the gaze of her spell. It flowed around him, eddying against the wards in his coat.

At the point she should have faltered she straightened her back, stood straighter. "I command you. You will hide nothing from me." 

The Island buckled to her Will, capitulating. Her eyes glowed like a brand, a hearthfire against the creeping of the dark. His wards shuddered, matter hitting mind. He set his feet, closed his eyes against the waves that flowed out from her. An impossibility of power he had to hide, contain. Bricks and mortar thrummed, their dust hovered in the air, worn off bits of buildings bumping against the roof of the ward he'd cast over the island. The sound of it, of industry turned weightless, was grindingly organic.

He looked up, his coat floating around his ribs. Against the ceiling of his sigils, all the secrets of the island floated. Bird bones, bits of brick, dust, and trespassing leaves from over the waterway. The sound was a low thrum that he felt down in his brain. The island stilled, caught in a strange in between state.

“She’s not here,” Shosa said, she moved her head, looking at things Felix couldn’t see. “There are some homeless people here, but none of them are the girl.”

“Any of them near us?”

“No, street folks know how to stay out of trouble. They’re staying put. It would make more trouble than it’s worth to try and hunt them down to erase their memory.”

“That’s cool with me,” Felix shrugged. He looked down from the red and blue light, the floating bits of the island, and froze. A pale light had appeared a whirlwind in front of them. It was a pale swirl of pale pink, patches of colors like petals swirling around it.

Shosa was still looking into the far distance of her spell and had missed what was right in front of them. As far as judgment went, Felix had no legs to stand on, he’d been staring up at the pretty colors.

“Shosa,” he said. “She’s here.”

“She’s not,” she said, blinking away the effect of the spell. “I would have-”

The young lady solidified, as much as she could solidify. 

She flickered in front of them, pale and exhausted by the effort. Her eyes though were wild, wide open, harried as a hart. The smog clung to her ankles, sticking and then releasing as if burred. “You were looking for me. I could feel it.”

She broke through his shield. She appeared on the other side of his shield. Did he know how she managed to do that? Was his magic failing in his old age or was it something else? That something else wracked his face in horror and sorrow before he got himself under control.

“What’s your name?” Shosa asked.

“Alice. I’m Alice.” Her body wracked forward in a jagged stumble. Her arms wrapped around herself as though to catch herself from falling.

“Where are you?” Shosa asked. “Just tell us and we’ll come find you.”

She cried out, a low guttural sound. Her face crumpled, frustrated and crying. She flickered from the soft pink she preferred to present herself in to a ragged waif, the circles under her eyes dark from kohl and sleepless nights, and despair. Her hands hung from her arms in a loose collection of bones, her face too thin, too gray. The breath stopped in Felix’s chest at the change.

Something changed in Shosa’s face, a sudden wave of epiphany. “We won’t come for you! We’ll leave you be! You don’t have to tell us anything, we don’t want you to. We’re just here. People with magic. That’s all we are.”

He looked at Shosa in confusion. That wasn’t right at all. He almost contradicted her, but experience taught him to trust her.

Alice shuddered back to her petal pink guise, panting. Exhaustion and relief turned her pale and limp. “I can’t feel him here. I can’t feel him at all.” 

“You don’t have to tell us about him, we don’t want you to. We’re not interested in him at all.”

Knuckles white where she gripped her sleep shirt, Alice panted down at her bare feet. “He wants so much. He wants me to do so much.”

Jolting like she’d been shot, Shosa flinched back on her heels.

She jolted back in place, body arching. “He wants me, I have to go.”

Shosa reached out her hand to make her stay, but there was nothing physical to command.

“Quick!” Felix said. “Take some of my power, Alice! If you bind me to you then you can take some of some of my power!”

She reached out to him. “Give it to me quick!”

Felix shouted, his words racing over each other to reach the end of the spell. “My spirit to your spirit, your spirit to mine! I am the fire watcher, the house breaker, Tutelary Vigiles, the cheerful boy, the light in the darkness, happy Felix. Name me and claim me your familiar spirit!”

Alice wove in place, her pale hands gripping the neck of her t-shirt. She was all hands and chin tilted back to accommodate the idea of the rope around her neck. Gaunt faced and haunted, her eyes glazed at the horror of the call behind her.

“Name me, Alice!”

Her body stuttered in place, overwhelmed and overwrought. 

“Alice!”

“I name you Felix! Bluebird of Happiness!”

She disappeared in a flush of rose petals and Felix’s legs went out from under him, his face hitting the asphalt with a crunch.

“You fool,” Shosa said above him. “You fool.”

There was an emptiness in him now, an emptiness that would remain until he was with his mistress. A compass that pointed him in the right direction. It was a solution.

“How could you have bound your spirit to hers?! She's a child! Do you know what chaos she might wreck with the ability to just call on your power whenever she wants!”

He made a low hollow gulp, rolling his forehead against the hard ground. “You told her we didn’t want to find her, that we wouldn’t help her.”

“Because I can observe. Someone’s put some kind of sorcery on her. She couldn’t say anything until I said I we wouldn’t help. It’s like that wizard from Belgrade you spelled up to keep him from telling everyone about magic all the time. Every time she tried to speak it was physically painful, she kept flickering. You heard her, there’s some man controlling her, and now because he controls her then he controls you. If he commands her to tell him about you then you’re grandfathered into his control.“

“She won’t tell.”

“You can’t know that. She is a child. And she's in trouble.”

Felix rolled onto his back to watch the swirling runescape of his sigils untwist themselves. Everything would stay fuzzy until he healed, all battered and confused and wrung out. “She won’t say anything. When someone has everything taken from them, they learn how to hide things away in secret cities they build inside themselves. They learn how to lie without lying they get a sense for loopholes.”

His sigils tumbled down, unlatching themselves from each other.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kandomere's name pronunciation comes from the guy who created the language. There's a post on it here: https://dedalvs.tumblr.com/post/172418968210/how-are-you-supposed-to-pronounce-kandomere-if?is_related_post=1 
> 
> Things are picking up at least. The story looks like it just wants to continue being people talking to people though.

Felix curled up small in the seat in the car. In the driver’s seat Shosa sat silent and furious.

“We need gas,” he said.

She let out a low annoyed breath and nodded.

He could feel the pull in his chest drawing him toward Alice. At first it had felt like a thousand remembered indignities, now though, it felt like a shoulder he was leaning on. Eyes flicking back and forth over the dark streets, he brought a hand up to worry the crystals and amulets around his wrist disguised as trendy jewelry.

Next to him, Shosa brought her chin down. It was an obvious tell that he was in for a telling off. “You are a Tutelary.”

Here it came.

“A guardian spirit, practically a small god in the right circumstances, and you made yourself a _familiar spirit_. A busboy for a child magician who is herself controlled by some stranger, the who is unknown by us except for their lack of morality.”

“Shosa, you’re being overbearing.”

“I’m being concerned.”

“You’re being overly concerned,” Felix told her.

"Why would you even do that given your-?" she stopped short, her eyes fixed ahead, her upper lip puffed up to press against her fangs.

"Given my what?" He sat up straighter.

"Given your past." She shifted gears the way one might redirect a horse.

This case was going to dredge up a lot of cultural differences, better to have them out now before the exceptional stuff started. "I'm not ashamed of having been a slave, its not shameful to me. It's just something I was at one part in my life."

She puffed her upper lip against her fangs again.

With a half helpless sound, Felix searched for the words. "You face exceptional hardship in this country, you have to deal with Walking While An Orc, and long stares in public spaces. You have to wade through all of that. For you though, at the end of the day, you are the woman you were raised to be. You were raised with a tremendous mantle from your birth. You were trained and taught and raised in power, a pillar of the earth made flesh. You became a great warrior and a great shamaness. You know honor, you walked with it, it ate at your table, in was enthroned in your household. I understand it’s important to you and I don’t think it’s wrong that it is. I would like it if you would understand too that that wasn’t how I came into the world.”

Her hands creaked on the wheel, but as always, being fair was important to Shosa.

“I’m not ashamed that I was born a slave,” he told her. “That’s how it was in Rome. People were what they were raised into. I was nurse at the breast of an orcish prostitute, and I am not ashamed of her or what she did just as I'm not ashamed of what I was made to do. I have no reason to be ashamed because I had no choice, it wasn’t because of anything I did wrong. Besides, it’s okay now. Rome fell long ago and I’m here now, still alive, in a nation that is more than gentle to humans.”

The streetlights were yellow and bright. Warm in the darkness of the night.

“I understand you think it must be the worst thing in the world, to be a slave. When you’re a slave though, you learn little ways to have a choice. Little ways to be yourself, you let things go like sand between your fingers and learn to take the one thing that belongs to you and hide it in a deep and secret place that can’t be stolen, only broken out of you. I had my one thing, and no one can take that from me.

“I saw that in Alice, the way she let go of some things and the secret she had in the sacred geography of her heart. I am her secret now, and I won’t let her captor break me out of her. She’ll keep me secret and I’ll keep her safe until we find her.”

“How can you just take it so easily?” Shosa asked him.

He looked out the window at the passing buildings. “Because I’m going to have to take it either way and all the choice I have is how I take it.” His fingers tapped against his ankle. “And I know I can take it. I know what I am. I know the parts of me beyond what can be touched. I’m the fire watcher, I’m the house breaker, I’m the bluebird of happiness.”

“I still think this is foolishness,” she huffed out.

Considering her, he tapped his fingers against his ankle again. “I must be a poor teacher for you to have forgotten so totally which of us is the elder. Have I treated you too much my equal instead of my student?”

Finally, she looked at him, her mouth quirking up in the corner. “Perhaps you have. I fall too easily into being the leader, even when it isn’t necessary.”

Tension eased out of his shoulders now they were back on a well-trod path. “I dislike telling competent people what to do when they clearly know what they’re doing.”

She leaned back into the seat.. “There’s a gas station up ahead. I’ll fill the tank if you go get something to eat.”

“Sure.”

“I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”

The light of the gas station made an island up ahead. When their car rolled into a stop it seemed an abrupt exposure. There was a group of young people in states of repose around a painted van. Two cars parked up by the station mart, an older woman filling a steel gray car. Manageable and safe.

“Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t,” Felix answered, his smile curling up. 

“So cryptic. I’m sure blowing you a kiss will clear you right up.” She pressed her lips to the tips of her fingers before tapping them right above Felix’s heart.

“That’s so sweet!” he chirped, hands on his cheeks. “Let me just return that for you!” He _mwahed_ against his fingers and popped them into the bend of her elbow. Before she could so much as raise a finger to her lips he darted out of the car into the mart on long legs. The gas station attendant blinked sleepily at the way he hop-skip-hopped to a stop. Thusly approved, Felix made his way to the snack aisle.

Among the chips and trail mixes he considered. Time had to be taken when it could. This would be a rough case for Shosa. She was very wise, and very strong, with a clear eye on all but herself. Since their meeting, Felix had seen potential in her for someone who could meet and perhaps overtake him in power and hadn’t been disappointed. There were some things though she hadn’t yet realised about herself. He’d protected her from it, perhaps in error, but now it was time for her to progress.

He filled his arms with food Shosa could eat. Venison jerky, almonds, Pringles, and peppermint patties. Nothing with cow byproducts in it. Humans were like goats, they could eat anything, orcs were a little more discerning. He came around the corner of shelf, feeling quite full of himself, and froze.

There was an elf, right there, in the gas station mart. He could see his pointed ear and his bright teal hair.

He blinked at the elf. His Tutelary training set his eyes in a path of observations while his brain was still processing seeing an elf in a gas station at whatever o clock at night facing the drinks case. Little details stuck out, the mud on his designer shoes, the way his hand flexing loosely at his side - expending valiant effort to avoid crossing his arms over his chest, the fluorescent lights turned his hair a vibrant blue, a sturdiness that went from shoulder to thigh in a way Felix could not complain about, and he had that really serious look someone had when they were worried someone wouldn’t take them seriously. 

Most of all he looked overwhelmed - on the edge of giving in. There was an undeniable pleasure at seeing an elf lost and unsure, alone late at night followed by the indifference that came from time. Time had pulled him out of his past before he realized it. Now, Felix responded to the distress in a way that was about him being a Tutelary, of the innate desire to protect things.

“You’ll want Arizona iced tea,” Felix told him. He knocked the heel of his boot against his ankle. There was a rhythm between the hum of the lights and the AC and sound of his heartbeat in his ears.

The elf’s head snapped around to look at him - hair swinging, eyes wide. For a second Felix was in front of his dominus, but he didn’t have a dominus anymore. He owned himself. This was just an elf and Felix was just a human shaped person. Fear was not the teacher it like to think itself. There was shock on the elf's face, he stared at Felix for a beat too long before his features smoothed out, composed themselves.

The elf arranged himself upright, making himself an edifice. There was something intense about his eyes. Consideration fell upon Felix as the elf’s nostrils flared in that way the race pretended they were above. At least orcs were discrete about it. The flicker of the convenience store lights turned the elf’s face gray and faded and lonely. He looked trying not to be lost, trying to stand in a place he knew he didn’t belong. “Pardon?”

Felix thought of all the snide things he could say, things that would roll off the back of an elf anyway. Instead, he thought he might see what would happen if he was just kind. “You look like you’re in the middle of a new adventure, and adventurers usually need assistance along the way.”

The grayness of the man’s face flinched away with the flicker of a smile, confused amusement mixing with the caution. A bit too much condescension, but Rome wasn't built in a day. “You want to help me on my adventure then?”

"Everyone needs a little help sometimes, it's healthy. Reminds us there are other people in the world. And you look like you might need a little bit of help."

"The owner of the establishment asked if I was lost."

"Not you," Felix said looking him over with a discerning eye. (He was not complaining about the view either.) "You're the sort of person who knows where you are at all times."

"What an interesting thing to say."

"I'm an interesting person."

Shaking his head, the man let out the breath of a laugh, it was better than the exhaustion that had been haunting him.

“You look like you’re not really familiar with gas station drinks. If you don’t mind me saying. You’ll want Arizona iced tea. It’s got less sugar than a lot of the other stuff and inexpensive. Going for the juice might seem like a good idea, but this late it’ll give you heartburn like a beast and it’ll burn out of your system in half an hour. You'll be starving and regretting your life choices.”

Shuffling the Pringles and trail mix he opened the case to pass a can over and grab a bundle for himself and Shosa.

“It’s not just for me,” the elf said. "I have a-" he swallowed as if the word were a fish bone in his throat, "supervisor."

"Good for you," Felix told him, grinning.

"I can't tell if you're being sarcastic."

"Not this time. Whatever you're doing, having a supervisor will teach you a lot. Never had a boss before, have you?"

"No," he admitted, he did an impressive job of resisting leaning into Felix's innate Blue magic even as his shoulders kept relaxing. "I didn't expect it to be what it is."

"So what are you doing that's got mud on your shoes? What's got you working with a _supervisor_ and running around in the muck?"

The elf's attention sharpened, Possibly a misstep to mention a detail like the muddy shoes. The man didn't look down, kept his eyes on Felix. He was sending out real cop vibes, but elves weren't cops. That was stretching their sense of civil responsibility a bit too far. "Not paying attention to where I was walking mostly. I work in... artifact acquisition."

"That was quite a dramatic pause you had there," Felix laughed, even as he bounced between his heels and toes. "I hope you don't mind that I say I love history."

"Any particular history?"

"All the little ones. I like to know what people carried in their pockets, what spoons did they use, what hats did they wear? I like people, I like to see who they are."

The man pulled out a silver case and deliberated for a second before pulling out a card, holding it out as if the gesture had real weight. "Maybe you should contact me, Chicago has some museums worth a look. I might even be able to tell you something you didn't know about spoons and hats."

The card was in _Övüsi Kieru_ , gilded silver, a color that was navy blue's far more refined cousin. Huffing out a laugh, he tilted it back and forth so the light caught it. "Do you go by _Kannomire_ or Kandomere?"

The elf startled. "Kandomere usually. Unless its my grandmother. Your Övüsi is excellent."

"I'm a well of hidden talents. And Felix, since we're exchanging names. Thank you for the card, I should let you get back to your supervisor."

"Thank you for your help. I think she sent me in here as a sort of test. She doesn't think I can stick with it." He looked at the Arizona can in his hand, turning it back and forth to catch the light. "I don't know why I'm even telling you this."

"I've got one of those faces, looks like I couldn't hurt a fly."

He looked at Felix, turning sharp, awake, professional. "Could you? Hurt a fly I mean.”

Felix laughed, "Depends on the fly. Anything else you need advice on? Which gas station sandwich is safest, why salt and vinegar chips are the best, how to select the best late night office food?"

"Thusly provisioned, I think I can handle just about anything." The corner of Kandomere's mouth crooked up.

"Chin up, friend." Felix told him. "You know that old parable, you don't have to be faster than the manticore, just faster than the person behind you."

"What does that even mean?"

"You don't have to last forever, just longer than your supervisor. Until then just learn everything you can." Cans and bags and wrappers rustled in his arms. "I have to go, night waits on no man. Nice to meet you though."

"Travel in safety then," Kandomere told him, all well arranged manners and well practiced solemnity. There was a moment he almost seemed to say something more, his mouth opening and then closing, then he just nodded and turned away.

The cashier focused so much at the curiosity of an elf in his corner store that he only spared Felix just enough of a glance to check him out. Maybe he should have erased the elf’s memory. Though gas stations were starting to have cameras now, and that made things awkward. Besides, he hadn’t said anything to the elf about Alice or why he was here, or anything like that. And Shosa was disturbed by it, the mutability of memory.

He had decided to put it out of his mind by the time he slid back into the car.

"I thought you didn't date elves anymore?" Shosa asked.

Felix blinked over at her. "I didn't even think of that. You think he wants to date me?"

After a moment of consideration she relieved him of the peppermint patties. "He gave you his card."

Felix looked down at it where he’d kept it clenched between two fingers, turning it in the light again. "I thought he just wanted a friend. Elves are always overdramatic like that."

“Maybe,” Shosa said.

It unsettled him. That he was had no real anger at this elf who had wandered into a place without concierge service and little warm wet towels to wash his hands. That he was powerful enough now to overcome his past. A lot of the power Felix had given elves in his head was just that now, in his head. He had lost most of the old habitual deference, had grown tired of it. Inside the deepest part of him, he couldn’t find much more than the memory of a memory of that old fear. It looked like all things died of old age except him.

He stared down at the writing flashing silver in the light. “Maybe,” he allowed.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No beta and a lot of talking. Alice finally gets her bluebird on the shoulder.

Professionalism had always been a shifting scale with them. So when Felix heard a voice with phantom ears call for the Bluebird of Happiness with the tug that came with the call of a familiar, he threw his can of Pringles into the back seat and shouted, “I’m being paged, tell that elf he has a very good butt!”

His senses curled in on themselves, a rolling, sinking feeling. Everything went weightless as his body went from solid to ethereal. He fell back through the seat, pale roots of the world tree opened up from the astral plane and wrapped around him. Inside of a second he fell full bodied into the too bright clouds of the astral plane. Time stretched meaninglessly long and tangled short around him. The World Tree let its small rootlets twine around the blue magic that floated around him. He laughed, his wards and sigils spinning their way across his skin like tattoos in the revealing light of this space between spaces. 

Alice had called him from across Chicago, it extremity she had named Bluebird of Happiness. If nothing else that told him what she needed from him, where she drew her own strength.

Then all levity was gone.

He fluttered, shaped like a bluebird, onto Alice’s shoulder. There were in a small reddish room with two lamps and a groundswell of pillows. The room played at discretion while being obvious. This was a prostitute’s place of business. Alice knelt very straight at the head of the pile in an eyestrain of leopard print cut too low to suit her so she looked poorly slung into the thing. Her eyes tinged yellow and stared straight ahead even as he fluttered against her cheek.. Her hands were folded in her lap like the pages of a book left out in the rain.

If he asked what she wanted, he wasn’t certain she could respond. Her eyes burned, staring into the nothing of the void, a lack inside a lack inside a lack. She wanted him to be a bluebird, so he sang for her. A sound that vibrated against the heartstrings instead of the ears, full of the knowledge he and Shosa would get her out of here. One of her hands turned palm up, the fingers clenching once, clawed.

He landed trusting in her palm, and let her clench hold of him. He felt power go out of him as she cast a warding net around herself. It grew organic in cobalt and gold before turning invisible. The door swung open and she let her hand fall limp in slow increments at her side - protecting him in an drifting movement of the wrist.

Between her fingers he could just see the shape of a man in a bespoke suit. The man’s suit was cut narrow at the waist in a look that was as old fashioned as it was deliberately sensual and vain. Only a sorcerer or an elf could be that self involved. Felix fluttered in the shelter of Alice’s hand. In that moment he is so angry he is paralyzed.

The man held an amulet in his hand, a poisonous feeling thing dripping in silver magic, a bird skull with some kind of root knot tangled around it. It felt the way a flesh hook might - a little too hungry with a mechanical application not worth thinking about.

Alice’s hand tightened around Felix for comfort. The responsibility of trust was a complicated thing, killing the man would bring Felix a great deal of satisfaction, but it wasn’t what Alice needed. Wasn’t what she seemed to request. She needed escape. She needed someone steady enough to draw strength from them despite the shifting sands of her own hurt. Rage still twisted in the ethereal chambers of his little bird heart - not the weirdest form he’d been called into - but he needed to support Alice first. 

“Now, while you still remember,” the man said, hand clenching on the amulet. “Tell me what you remember from the clients mind.”

She let out a soft little sough of sound.

The man snapped his fingers - one, two, three - at her. Felix surged up against her palm in a fury. She held him still against her thigh.

“The client wanted to cut people up again, he wanted me to make him feel like he cut up people. He always wants me to make it feel real while he imagines cutting up people.”

“You’ve really started whining again,” the man told her, leaning in contrapposto. As if this was a game, as if he was being indulgent and Alice was being unreasonable. “It’s just pretend, its just in your head. You’re practically doing a public service. It’s better that nutjob has you fulfilling his fantasies just as fantasies than having him run around actually killing people.”

It seemed Alice’s yellow magic was well developed if she was using it to make what was in people’s minds feel real to them. Real to her. There had been worse abuses of power, this one felt personal though, felt raw through their shared connection. 

It would have to be yellow magic, not blue then. He could give people all manner of feelings and make a patchwork quilt of their memory, but he wouldn’t be able to create a fantasy that felt real as reality. With help a yellow seer could craft dream that would still feel real. Even if she was an incredibly powerful Bright, she would need something to help her focus her power. 

And here he was in the mix. All he could do was lean on his experience, his professionalism. Blue magic couldn’t hurt anyone anyway. Not directly. He needed to think, parse, categorize his way into a plan.

Was this what the man was inflicting on Alice? Made her craft fantasies for people that they didn’t dare to fulfill in real life. He hated this man for not realizing that it felt real to her, that it was real to her, that it should never have been asked.

“Speaking of which,” the sorcerer said, hand clenching on the bird skull amulet. “There are two parts to your job. What information did you fish out of his head? Anything blackmail worthy?”

“I-” Alice said. Power pulled out of Felix again to gather up somewhere inside her life a security blanket. The draw of power between them only connected them further - mixed their feelings. Felix focused on his faith in Shosa and his confidence in his own work experience.

“Not anything more than fantasizing about torturing people,” she said.

The Sorcerer clutched at the amulet again. Alice’s gasp had more to do with the lack of pain than its presence. “What is wrong with you? You’ve been weak, pull yourself together.”

She pulled upright, quiet and controlled - a pantomime of someone cowed. “I can’t think of anything, there was so much, it’ll take time for me to parse everything out.”

“Get yourself together quickly, you have another client. Get me something I can bargain with, if we can’t make enough with in house clients I’ll put you back out on the street corner.”

“You won’t risk me,” she said. “Someone could take me from you and then you’ll have nothing.”

The man laughed. The jolliness, the confidence, in the sound made Felix want to boot him out a window. “There are plenty of bones, Alice. Everyone is replaceable. I can always dig up someone else.”

Felix was starting to feel as though his suspicions about how Alice got tangled up with a sorcerer might be true.

“Get yourself together, the client will be in soon. Give them what they want.”

As soon as the man left, slipped out the door in all his smugness, Felix slid out from between Alice’s fingers. Stretching up into the shape of a man, Felix knelt at her side. “Alice, do you need more power from me? You need rest to your spirit.”

“How much do you have?”

He leaned forward, careful not to lean too far into her space. His place on the pile of pillows made him a little unsteady. “My magic comes from my feeling, and I have a lot of feelings right now. You are under my protection.”

“You need to hide, the client is coming. He can’t know about you.”

“I’ll take this next one,” Felix told her.

“You can’t, you don’t know what to do.”

Felix tried to get into a position that looked confident. “A long time ago, I was… taken care of my someone who wanted me to fight for them. I’m much more of a lover than a fighter though - so they tried to recoup their investment by having me work to my strengths.”

“You were like me, a-” She looked at him for a moment. “A prostitute?”

He let out a bark of laughter. “I didn’t like it, I never really wanted to see clients, but the word itself doesn’t offend me. The proper word for it was Meretor, and _did I earn._ My magic lets me shape feeling. I’d take this crystal and put it on client’s chests and make them feel love, or satisfaction, or confidence, or whatever else thing. Sometimes I’d help them remember the best they ever had in crystal detail. Not the sort of thing you’re doing, while also sort of exactly the same.”

She blinked at him, curiosity bringing some life back into her. “You could make people feel love?”

“You’d be surprised what people would pay to be drenched in the feeling of being adored, of being the subject of real passion.” He gave up trying to sit up straight and leaned back. “At the end there I learned to put them to sleep and then just told them to remember that I had done whatever it was they requested and just told them to remember it was the best ever. I haven’t done that for ages though. I bought my way out and became, I guess the translation is, a watchman.”

“Won’t it hurt you?” she asked.

“I’ll put the client to sleep and give them a memorable experience. We have other things to talk about. My partner and I figured out that whatever is keeping you here is also keeping you from telling anyone what happened to you, or how to free you.”

“I can never confirm nor deny that is the case,” she told him, which was as good as a yes he could get in her present state.

“What this means is that my friend and I will have to stay in the city, but abandon the search for you,” he lied just in case the geis on her also compelled her to tattle tell. The next part was uncomfortably too much truth: “All I can do is offer to teach you as much as you might want to know about magic in general and your magic in the specific. The good news is, I have a huge deal of confidence in you, Alice. You can free yourself once you have the knowledge you need.”

“How do you know I can even really try to escape?”

He turned his palm up toward her, letting his quiet fury and his sincerity. “Well, it's a sort of catch twenty two. There sort of spells have it stitched into their nature that the person trapped can’t do anything to injure their captor - on purpose or by negligence. If you can’t speak, you can’t hurt that bootscrape.” His fingers flexed and relaxed. 

Alice watched him, her eyes waking up in calculation.

“So, all I need to do is let you know that if I thought you were really trapped here and that you couldn’t free yourself I have the knowledge and experience to break in and kill him, and you wouldn’t be able to stop me, not with all your magic, not with all your strength. The only thing sparing his life is my confidence in your ability to free yourself once you have the necessary assistance and knowledge.”

Felix had played this game before. It didn’t matter if it was the absolute truth, only if she believed he meant it in the moment. Before she could answer there was a knock and the door - more announcement than anything else and he body slammed back into bird form so he could hide behind her. Through their connection the numbness shifted like tectonic plates at the promise of action, at the appearance of options. He was grateful she was at a place where that freedom was welcome to her. He didn’t have it in him to make her do anything.

There was a blur of introduction and the client doing his little speil. Once the sorcerer left, Felix popped back up to regular size.

The client flustered in surprise at the sudden presence of someone else in the room. Felix just pushed the man back down with a hand to his face, blue light coming from the quartz around his wrist. “Go to sleep.”

Alice let out a sharp breath. “He’s going to remember and get us in trouble.”

“He’ll remember what I tell him to,” Felix assured her. “Just rest if you can. What would you like to do next?”

“Well,” she said, her mouth turning up at the corners in the ghost of a smile. “If you’re going to kill the sorcerer if I don’t escape, then I should probably start saving his life.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to some stomach issues, this chapter is a little late. (Unfortunately, my schedule doesn't allow for writing as far in advance as I'd like so I'm writing as I post.) This is a bit of a watercolor melodrama and this chapter is mostly dialogue. It owns itself though, so it has that going for it. Enjoy!

To Felix’s surprise, Alice curled her body to the side, her cheek pressed against the plane of his shoulder blade. They had known each other such a short time, and in addition, he was a man. But her body went limp, her side heavy against his spine.

He lifted his hand over the client’s face, he spread his fingers to create a rune overlaying the man’s face. Blue light cast down on the features turned vulgar by Felix’s disgust. His face looked coarse, weirdly wet, absent of human affection. _”Don’t remember my voice or what I look like. Forget the girl you saw tonight in this room, forget her voice and what she looks like. You will wake and feel only a sense of satisfaction. So much in fact that you will never desire to come here again.”_

Before he could say more he felt a pull from under his ribs. He was pulled back from the room into sunlight in perfect yellow watercolor brightness. He tumbled fluttering bluebird small and like a long-limbed man and burning blue, the lost ghost of a dead kingdom.

Then he stood by a lake, the breeze catching at his shirt sleeves. It was beautiful, this place. The sort of beautiful a place had never been. It was too picked clean, too much stuck in a single picturesque moment as if the trees knew how to do nothing but blow an eternity of flower petals over an eternity of mirror bright waters and the perfect control of light dappling over the grass.

How lovely a place for someone to make for themselves, where the trees never lost the flower of their youth and the pink sunlight was as soft as a cherry flavored chapstick kiss to the cheek. It wasn’t a place he belonged. He held happy childhood memories like spare change kept safe against spending in the glass jar of his heart and discarded the rest of it like pocket lint. Youth and he worked best as passing neighbors, this, however, was a regular Hundred Acre Woods. A fairy tale who’s greatest tragedies were just lesser comedies to be solved in an hour.

One could learn a lot about the secret people made for themselves. Without a doubt, Alice was a strong Bright was powerful. One did not keep their dreams petal pink without strength and power.

He bent to take off his shoes out of respect, tucking his fingers into the heels of his Converse. The woods were as still as a dollhouse so he turned to walk around the shore, his feet moving in syncopated jazz. Fast then slow then toe then heel then hop then slide the stop quick as a spring leaf to listen for any sound.

The sound of birds coming to life around him, their songs electric in the trees and then he turned to see Alice standing before him in one of those soft eyelet lace day dress. Overwhelmingly protective instinct flared in his chest.

“I’m safe,” she said, the wind kicking petals up around her ankles.

“If you were safe you wouldn’t have made this place. You brought me here easier than I thought you’d be able to pull me in.” He tapped his shoes against the side of his thigh. He was careful not to lean into her space; he didn’t want to cross any further into her mind than had already been crossed. Not without express permission.

Alice tilted her head, considered him. “You know I made this place.”

“All magic has a tone to it, something in the feel that is unique. And it has a Yellow tint to it, and you’re a Yellow Bright.”

“I don’t know what that means.” She looked eager to learn. “I know what Bright means, it has to do with a wand.”

“It’s more than that.” He felt the place their intentions and feelings touched and mixed and matched. Felt her surprise and curiosity in the face of his affection and concern as if it was a novelty. Didn’t she ever have a father, an elder brother, an uncle? “Anyone can do magic if they have the right help, a Bright has magic in their bones. They bend and fold the people and things around them without even meaning to do it. You’re a Yellow Bright, your magic is in the eye. I need to teach you to protect yourself. Brights have been exploited for even longer than magic has been illegal.”

“Are you a Bright?” she asked.

“Yes,” he rolled a blue rune over his knuckles. “I’m a Bright of a certain type.”

Delight bloomed on her face. “Can I touch it?”

He flipped the rune over to catch it with his fingers, altered it and set a circle around it to make it a sigil of protection. “You can have it if you’d like. It's a sigil, it's like a bit of written instructions that catches magic in it. Let’s not bury the lead. You need to learn magic, real magic, not the hodgepodge you’ve been making due with.”

“I’m alright.”

“Alice, I don’t want to overstep. Please let me help to protect you. Someone’s trapped you already, how long until someone more powerful has trapped them.”

“What will you do when you find them?” she asked.

“You’re my primary concern.”

She looked at him as if he said something so strange, so foreign. Her head tilted in bemusement. “If that takes finding the person who trapped me?” She caught part of her loose skirt between two fingers.

“We’ve talked about this already,” he told her.

“If it takes killing him?”

He moved to stand next to her, her eyes flicked over him with a bright curiosity. “If it takes that, I’ll do that too. Like I said, you’re my primary concern. It won’t come to that, will it?”

She laughed in a rattle, head tilted to tease him with the sort of hollowness behind it that came when someone was trying to play at everything being normal. “We talked about this already. Do you really think I can get free of him?”

He stepped forward, “We all get by with a little help from our friends.”

“The man doesn’t matter. It’s more than that.” She began to walk so he walked with her, his feet catch heel and toe and hop in the sand so they made little dunes. So that it drew a geography behind them. When they reached the spot that was right to her, she sat. Her hands curled under her thighs to tuck the skirt of her dress under the crease of her knees.

Felix waited, looking out over the lake and the soft, smooth ripples.

“You wouldn't believe me,” she told him after the weight between them turned light.

“I would believe anything you told me.”

“You wouldn't,” she watched him, analyzed his every shift and blink.

“You're too smart to lie unless you had a good reason.” He let out a breath, the light around him slanted a burning blue, turned deep as cobalt, turned cool as clean water. “I understand you’ve been hurt before. I want you to be able to claim your trust in me like a victory, I want you to be able to win it from your past. We don’t have time for that. Can’t you feel that I only want to help you as best as I can for as long I need to help you?”

“Where does Blue magic sit?” she asked him, looking up at him. Her eyes burned like molten gold.

“In the heart, where a man is what he is and what he isn’t,” he answered, this is where things could get bad between them. This was the turn of the magic trick.

“You don’t want to have sex with me?”

He stood straight, ready to be driven out. Not making a home any place where he hadn’t been given a plot of land. “No, you’re a child to me.”

She tilted her head at him.

“Darling, surely you must remember someone who wanted to protect you and help you just because you were small and young to them.”

“Maybe,” she bit off the word. “It feels so long ago. I think someone must have wanted to once. I wouldn’t be this way if it wasn’t because someone wanted to take care of me once. Let me see your heart. If I see your power then I’ll know.”

"You don't know me. We shouldn't be having these kinds of conversations. We haven't earned them from each other yet."

The lake lapped against her toes. "You act like we don't have time. Do we have the years to earn these kinds of conversations?"

"No," he admitted, perfectly still for once.

"Then show me your heart."

He looked at her, could feel the sorrow in his eyes like stone. “Darling. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’re one of the good guys, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “My job is to protect and keep balance. Some people say that would be an automatic yes, but things are more complicated. Sometimes I’m selfish, and I keep things from people I love so that I don’t have to deal with consequences, I do things that hurt other people. I wouldn’t kill the man who’s trapped you. I’d do far better and much worse in the secret and quiet where it was just the two of us. I would do it because what he’s forcing you to do makes me angry and I would do it because I never got to hurt any of the men who hurt me. I’d wear the self-satisfaction like justice, but both of us know what it would really be.”

She reached out, her hand curling around the back of his neck, his fingers brushing against the wildness of his hair. She pressed her cheek to his shoulder, shifting her head to get comfortable against the plane of his collarbone. "I think you're good. The kind of good I need. The kind that only asks for its own satisfaction and leaves me alone. You really think you can teach me?"

"I think that it would be an honor to teach you the basics. You're incredibly powerful. Like oxygen before the match is lit. I don't know what I can teach you past that."

"If people ask you will you tell them we're related?"

"Do you want that?"

"Do you think people will believe you're my uncle? I guess you could be my brother to be safe. You look too young to be my father."

“Don’t move too fast and regret the intimacy,” he warned her.

“He’s not really trapping me,” she told him. “Its the city. Have you ever been trapped by a place?”

“I’ve been trapped by a lot of things.”

Her eyes were as sure as amber, as sure as gold. “You were like me. You were just like me once. What happened?”

“I decided what I wanted to be and then I tore myself apart getting it then let it put me back together again. Magic was different back then.”

“You’re older than you look, I can’t see your beginning like I can with most people.”

His smile turned plastic. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Everyone rathers that I didn’t.” She shrugged, her finger slid back and forth across the sand. “Look what I made.”

“The book told you to make this.”

Her eyes snapped to his.

“I told you I know about how magic works. It doesn't matter the magical potential if there's no outlet for it. This type of magic comes from the complicated effects of a spell book." His fingers tightened in his shoes. "You know it doesn’t care about you, that it's trying to use you to meet its goal. Can you tell me what it wants from you? What’s its thesis?”

“How can it want anything?” she said, her fingers in the sand.

“Magic has intent, has things it can do and things it can’t.” He spread his fingers apart, another sigil appearing in the stretch. The enclosing circle of tiny runes orbiting the inner esoteric geometry. “I’m a Blue Bright, my power has to do with the heart, what makes a person a person. I can heal people and I can shape their memory and I can protect them, for all of that, if I go against the nature of my magic and try to harm someone with it, if I act without love it will turn to poison. My blood will turn to venom in my veins, turn black, and I’ll die.”

“I’ve never heard of that before.”

“Magic has been outlawed for over three hundred years, they tied witches and wizards to stones and drowned them, they burned the Brights at the stake and put out the eyes of the Seers. Anything worth knowing has been lost or hidden or taken away.”

“You feel responsible.” She curled her hands over her knees, leaning forward.

“The people I work with, in a way we are responsible. We trusted someone, shared a spell with them because we thought they would help people. But they went against their magic and did something terrible.”

“People died.”

“They have that habit.”

“Places don't die. People talk about the end of the world like that means anything. I bet the dinosaurs talked about the end of the world too.” Her fingers tapped against her knees. “Wait a while and all their tragedy turns to nothing, turns into a museum piece. Artfully arranged vertebrae.”

Felix tapped his fingers against his ankles

"I'll let you help me escape," Alice said, turned her head to look out over the ocean.

“My partner and I can't come and find you. This would be easier if you’d come to meet us in person.”

“I can’t,” she insisted. “I won’t.”

“Alright.” He nodded, pressed his lips together for a moment to keep from arguing about it. He pulled one of the beaded bracelets from his own wrist and held it out to her, its little purple scarabs catching the light. “You need to find three stones you can wear. You need turquoise, clear quartz, and amethyst. I’ll leave you this, it’ll protect and help strengthen your magic. I can hide money for you to help you get the others.”

“Don’t you have turquoise and quartz for me?” She cupped the back of his hand so she could trace her fingers over the beads and iron runes on leather braids.

“I can’t wear turquoise.”

“Why not?” Her attention was on tracing the runes with her nail.

“It makes my spirit travel, astral projection, I have some to use when I need it. Wearing it otherwise divides my attention too much, it makes me have to fight every second to stay in one place. It shouldn’t do the same to you, instead, it should make your travel smoother, easier. Or if it does give you trouble, just take it off and hide it away again.”

Alice turned her head to look out across the shore. "Time's up. It's time for you to go."

"You called me here," Felix told her. "You have to wake up."

"Fine," she said and pushed him into the lake.

He opened his eyes, swimming in vertigo. He felt the familiar movement and shift of Shosa's body next to him.

"It's alright," she said; her arms, her hands anchoring him. "It's alright. You're back. You're alright."


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot continues and there's pierogis.

Shosa and he had been partners for long enough they had fallen together in the same hotel or when one or the other of them had some nightmare or sorrow. He pressed his body against the side of hers, let them form the physicality of their bodies as a single unified power.

She gripped the back of his hand, holding his palm where it had settled against her collarbone. Her leg shifted over where he curled his knees up to protect his belly. His heart juddered in his chest, his fingers flexing against her skin in time. It didn’t so much hurt as _feel_. He felt where his skin and his clothes touched like his nerves were counting the fibers. He felt the slide of his eyelids on his eyes. He felt the weight of his bones in his flesh, the flex and compression of his organs.

“You’re back,” Shosa said. “You’re here, safe with me.”

Shosa was a bulwark. She was so certain about everything and her certainty shaped the world around her like a fist around a ball of clay, imprinting it with her shape. The waves of feeling he brought with him, anger and affection and amusement and the weight of both fitting into place and being knocked out of joint.

“I’m okay, Shosa,” he told her. “It’s not that bad for me. It’s just a lot, all at once.”

“It’s _not that bad_ ”

Felix pressed his cheek against her shoulder. The anger that hit him earlier simmered down, lay in wait. To rest until the fury passed, leaving only the resolution.

He let out a hiss of breath, trying to center himself.

Affection bled out of him like his heart was a wound freshly made. It was his nature to be a happy man, to be fond. He wanted to be. Misery got boring. It just... got boring. It was even harder to be angry with Shosa there beside him. She was so certain about things, so steadfast. A person couldn't always be pouring from place to place, couldn't be always bleeding out into the world.

"You need to be more in your body," Shosa told him. "It's not healthy for you to be pulled apart this way."

"I won't leave Alice alone," Felix said. "She is alone and trapped. I lied to her and told her we would stop looking for her to satisfy the spell's security measures, but I don't know that I could stop until she's safe."

"You never had children, did you?" Shosa raised a hand to smooth down the wild riot of his hair.

He looked up at her. "You know the answer to that."

"I thought I did. I thought I knew everything about you."

"I'm not taking the bait." Felix was tired of talking about feelings, was feeling sore where he had pulled back the veil on himself. He was done talking about feelings. He closed his eyes and curled against her side.

Her fingers combed through his hair. "We've been partners for as long as I've been a Tutelary. For a small age. Nothing about you has surprised me for longer than most people are alive. And then today."

"My past belongs to me, Shosa."

Signing, her arms tightened around him. "It does. I never know where I overstep. You have a memory tangled around your fingers."

He had started upright, he had forgotten about Alice's client. Tangled around his fingers, the client's memory clung cobweb sticky to his fingertips in gradient light. It was a wonder the memory hadn't escaped, it wasn't like him. Hopping from the bed, he pulled a glass jar from the suitcase. It had been a salsa jar at some point, now its glass held the stolen memory of Alice and Felix. They had brought four jars with them for miscellaneous memory snatching, they might need more.

"Who were they," Shosa asked from bere she sighed and shifted on the bed.

"One of Alice's clients. He won't be back." A sudden thick feeling in his chest curled up his lip and clenched his hand around the jar.

"My husband, Rangu. He was the same way. One of the hunter's apprentices started strutting past sweet Zadak and Rangu just about lost his mind. It's a very different situation, still, that old familiar desire to protect one's children is unmistakable. The mix of fear, rage, and desperation."

Felix set down the jar and started changing for bed. 

"You'll be fine," she told him as she yawned, rolling onto her side. "Just be sure to be thoughtful."

"Do you want me to sleep on the floor?" he asked.

"No. You're tired and I get lonely sleeping alone. I know I complain about your Blue magic, but a lady needs to sleep."

Felix pivoted, a hand on his chest, gasping as theatrically as he could given the night he'd had. "Shosa! Are you using me for my magic?"

She rolled her eyes. "Get in the bed, I want to go to sleep."

Despite the anxiety and fury that had been flowing through him earlier, the comforting weight of Shosa's arm - familiar and steadfast and safe - lulled him down to sleep.

He stirred to her stirring at dawn and then woke up again around eleven with Shosa's legs piled on top of his stomach and her arm curled over the top of his head. It took a moment to wiggle and squiggle out from under her, then it was just the familiar routine of changing from sleep clothes to day clothes as quietly as possible and trying to find an orc friendly coffee shop. As usual, he got some funny looks from the orcs in the little cafe - not just because he was a human in a little mom and pop orc shop, but because he carried the distinct smell of sleeping with an orc last night. Let them think what they want, orc food was better than what passed for human food in this country.

By the time he got back Shosa was doing up-downs, it was a good thing their hotel room was on the bottom floor. "I've got black coffee and venison pierogis."

She paused on the tips of her toes and one hand. "Yes, hand it over."

He placed a pierogi in her grasping hand.

"We're kind of delayed until nightfall. Do you want to try and poke around, or do the tourist thing to get a lay of the land and then start tonight?"

"Why wait?" she asked around a mouthful of delicious flavor.

"Prostitution hasn't changed that much in the past two thousand years. All the sex workers will be sleeping during the day and hitting the streets at about nine."

"We should be careful," Shosa told him, doing some kind of too athletic maneuver that had her move from poised to sitting back. "Chicago doesn't want us here."

Felix collapsed down in a flop onto the bed. "I'm oblivious to a lot of that kind of stuff, what kind of not wanting us is it doing?"

Her face turned thoughtful. "We've been to other living cities before, the strongest was Bordeaux. The city wrapped around me, made me forget my sorrow. It made me feel like I could live there forever, it made me want to be there forever. Like the world was falling in love with me. Chicago is the opposite. I feel this constant pressure, like its trying to push us out."

"Is it going to affect your work?"

She shrugged. "I can be as sharp as I need to be."

"It reminds me of something Alice said." Felix pulled out a pierogi of his own.

"Tell me everything you can inside her trust. I want to get moving. Chicago is a bloody city, I don't want it to pin us down in one spot. She and I are going to do our wrestle, you teach Alice what she needs to know to do what she can on her side."

After Felix had shared what he could they did some exploration to give each other a time to think. They watched the sun make its careful climb until it tucked its great eye below the edge of the Earth

Each city had its own place to go if one was lonely, had unique tastes, or just got off on power. Each piece of territory was mapped and memorized by its denizens, including those places where one could have specific tastes catered to. There would always be office gossip, no matter the office. Drive around long enough and he'd find someone who knew all that he needed. Beside him, Shosa breathed soft and deep - pushing back against the city that was trying to push them out. The sound soothed him better than the radio ever could. 

It didn't take long to stumble upon the right part of town. They wore leather miniskirts instead of tunics, but a lady of a certain occupation could not be mistaken once one knew what to look for. This lot looked too ready to work to talk and were grouped too close together to use a memory spell on. He needed someone on their own. They drove another ten minutes when he saw just the person. He reached down to tap Shosa’s knee a bit before reaching across to roll down the window.

A goblin woman leaned against the wall wearing too little clothes under her leather jacket, even for the warm weather. Felix bent down over the wheel to really get a look at her. She looked just over thirty, and without the skeletal despair of someone feeding a habit. A woman who knew her way around then. 

“Do we know her?” Shosa asked, shifting in the tight space.

“Not quite, she's just someone to ask. One sec,” Felix said, leaning across Shosa to talk to the woman.

He leaned half out the window, “Where would someone go to hire a sex worker who does weird stuff?”

“What kind of weird stuff, sugar?” the woman asked, leaning to rest her forearms on the car door. “You two have an itch that needs a special sort of scratch?”

“I’m sorry, I should have clearer,” Felix said. “We’re not looking to hire, we’re looking to find someone specific. Someone people say can make any weird fantasies someone might have come true.”

The woman looked back and forth between them, eyes narrowed. “Why would I know?”

“Look, it’s kind of an emergency situation,” Felix said. “You’re in good shape, you’re older, that’s an expensive jacket. You know the territory.”

“Who are you two? Orcs can’t be cops,” the woman said, still looking like she was figuring them out. People tended to look at him and think he was harmless, he had that guileless look about him. Shosa was a bit different, no matter what she looked like people saw an orc. They made it work.

Felix shrugged. “Orcs can’t be cops for now.”

“You two are something else then.”

“We’re looking for a human girl. Blonde, silvery blue eyes?” Shosa asked.

“Blonde is popular this year. Who’s looking? You got some kind of ID?”

Felix shifted to pull out his wallet. “That’s me,” he said. Shosa rolled her eyes as he just held it out. They’d have to trust somebody and he was going to erase her memory anyway."

She looked at the license, staring at his picture, it looked dopey he knew. She snorted out a laugh at it. 

“Look. The girl we’re looking for. She was taken, she’s in danger from some very bad people,” Felix said. 

The woman swallowed. “Bad people as in I-shouldn’t-be-seen-talking-to-you bad?”

“They don’t know we’re coming,” Shosa told her. “And afterward they’re not going to be looking for anything at all.”

“Why do you care?” She pushed her way through the cards in his wallet, library, the stacks of ice cream punch cards, and his carefully folded receipts. “Why do you have a receipt for twenty-seven cans of Arizona iced tea?”

“Arizona iced tea is one of the four major food groups. Keeps you hydrated. And helps us finding kids who don’t have anyone else apparently.”

She handed back the wallet. "Sorry, I can't help."

"You might have heard of a similar woman ten, fifteen years ago, rumors of someone."

Something in the woman’s eyes turned intrigued, she pulled back, slipping her hands into her jacket pockets. “I might have heard weird stories about someone, but I don’t remember anything concrete. It was a while ago."

"You still remember details?" Shosa asked.

"They were really weird stories," the goblin said. "A while back I there was this rumor that if someone were looking for company that could make their dreams come true, they could go to this park. That was a while ago, she just disappeared. Everybody figured she either got killed, got better clients, or got out."

Something changed on Shosa's face.

The goblin lady shifted. "If someone similar is working the same sort of thing they haven't been on the street. You'd have more luck with call girls, people who do specialty work. People start taking tricks for a lot of reasons, it’s not my business to stick my nose in."

"Where's the park?" Felix asked. "Are we talking Lincoln?"

"Not like a city park, just this weird lot that’s all grassy and overgrown. Head toward Ogretown from here and then you’ll see a weird bridge thing and just keep going straight past some office buildings. If you don’t see it you haven’t gone far enough, you can’t miss it. ”

“Thanks,” Felix told her and passed over some folded bills.

The woman’s eyelids flinched when she saw the top hundred, but made no other sign she’d just been passed several hundred dollars. “Have you got a business card? Just in case I see something?”

“That would be really helpful,” Felix said. “But I’m afraid because of the nature of our work you just can’t remember us. We’ve got to be like ghosts or the cosmic mysteries of the universe. It’s just too dangerous for you and for us. The money is yours, but not the memory.”

“What?” she said, brow furrowing. 

“Obliviscar,” Felix told her, reaching across to snap in front of the woman’s face, a rune flashed over her fingers and the goblin’s eyes flashed cobalt. As though in a dream, she stood and walked back to the wall. 

“Can you not do that right in front of my face?” Shosa said as she rolled up the car window. “One of these days you’re going to erase my memory on accident. Or erase your own memory.”

“I couldn’t erase my own memory on accident.”

“Somehow I am not comforted.”

“You should be. I’m incredibly comforting.” He sat up straighter in his seat, hamming it up a bit. 

“You’re incredibly something.”

“Charming?” he asked. “Smart? Funny?”

She huffed out a laugh.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not betaed. Everyone is a bit out of it at my house and this chapter was long enough, so here it is!

Even just thirty years before they could have cruised along without bringing too much attention to themselves. Times had changed though, the last of the Cruisers were just the memorials that showed up in the movies. People would notice them. They’d notice them anyway. Shosa was a beautiful woman and an orc, and Felix was noticeably mobile. They’d just have to be fast.

They’d started down what looked like the right street. It was narrow, looked strangely Old World - a European transplant. The buildings were old brick and the street lights yellow. In the distance, there was the unmistakable flurry of green that came from a bit of overlooked nature. If he wasn’t the right street Felix would eat his hat. He didn’t have a hat, but he could get one. It looked like they were traveling along a row of eerie clubs and bars with their neon lights on, yet no lines.

“Have we stumbled into a pocket of fairyland?” Felix asked, more to just comment on the oddness than anything else.

“It’s a weeknight,” Shosa offered. “It’s still pretty weird. Something is doing some sort of crowd control here. The question is who is doing the containment, and what are they trying to contain? Information, a clear line of sight, people.”

“That’s big magic.”

“Fae and monsters,” Shosa agreed. “If there’s something here containing the citizenry, it hasn’t attracted enough attention to be destroyed yet, and it's not our problem.”

“And if its Chicago making sure we can’t get lost in the crowd then it already knows we’re here,” Felix completed the thought. He squinted up ahead. There was someone in a great suit talking to a restaurant employee who stood with a trash bag hanging from one hand. He thought he recognized the back of that suit.

“Hey,” Felix said. “Is that great butt elf?”

“We’re not calling him that,” Shosa said. 

Felix squinted, leaning forward. “That _is_ great butt elf!”

“What is he doing here?” Shosa leaned back, her presence growing heavier beside him.

The elf seemed to be actually asking him something. Questioning him, it looked like. “Why would he be questioning bar staff?”

“Why would he be questioning bar staff outside the _back_ of the bar?”

“He said he was in artifact acquisition,” Felix snuck a look over at Shosa’s thoughtful face. They couldn’t drive much slower without parking and shouting out the window.

“Artifact acquisition, and now he’s interviewing someone who works at a bar on a street where Alice used to work. Didn’t you say the evil sorcerer had a strange bird skull amulet? What do you want to bet he’s after that. Normally I’d say it was the Shield of Light since the Inferni generally source from in-house, but the Shield doesn’t work with elves.”

“I mean he didn’t _feel_ like inbreeding and genocide,” Felix told her. 

“I trust your senses. He’s an independent agent then. Not everyone is satisfied with their place in the Inferni strata.”

“He had mud on his shoes,” Felix told her. They passed the elf without his active notice by some miracle - though when did elves ever notice anything that didn't have to do with them. "He must have already searched in the not-a-park. What was his source though?" He didn't like being shown up by an elf, especially since they had the power of the tutelary behind them.

A red glow sparked up from where Shosa had clenched her hand on the seat. _”Casting senses far from me, ear to hear and eye to see,”_ she Spelled and turned in her seat to cast the Red bolt at the elf’s shoulder. The elf jumped about a foot in the air and stepped past the bar staff member, half drawing his gun as he looked after them, the only car driving down the street.

“You couldn’t have waited?” Felix said out of the side of his mouth.

Shosa shrugged. “Who knows when we’ll get another chance.”

One look at the gun and the staff member took off back inside the building.

“Well, he sees us now. He's going to have our license plate and car model." He let out a hiss of breath. "I get you though. We might not get a better chance and I want to know who his source is."

"It's not that while to think that someone else might be on the case. All we did was question one sex worker." Her eyes were set on the rearview mirror even as her mouth curled up at the corner.

"Hey," Felix said while he tried to discreetly drive them away as fast as possible. The elf pulled out an enormous cell phone - because mundane technology was lame- and lifted it to his face as they went around a corner. "Number one, we also attracted the attention of our Bright friend with the power of our good vibes- so not just questioning someone. Number two, my questioning technique is never _just_ anything. I am a beautiful, wonderful question machine."

"Uh-huh," she teased, pulling out her scrying glass. "If he's calling for reinforcements, how are we going to sneak into the little woods?"

"I was thinking, leave the car and sneak in the back way. You think you can get away with walking while orc in this neighborhood?"

"As long as we're quick. And as long as you don't get called away by our new friend." She rapped her knuckles twice against the glass. _"Let ears hear, let eyes see."_

An image of the elf appeared on the glass, the sharp edge of his accented voice came over the line. "Our contact in the police should be able to locate them." There was a pause in which Kandomere listened to whoever was on the other side, Shosa's ears twitched, and Felix tried to find a parking garage where he could switch their plates in privacy.

"They definitely hit me with something," Kandomere continued on the surface of Shosa's scrying glass. "If there was someone else in the area I would have smelled them."

"Okay, I know that's true," Shosa said, taking advantage of the one way nature of the spell to communicate. "But that's real creepy."

"The human didn't know anything of use," Kandomere said to whoever was on the other side, "Other than the last time there were prostitutes in the area was before the current revitalization."

Shosa leaned forward. "So the area became gentrified and the sex workers had nowhere to work? They all either moved to more mundane areas or were picked up by a creepster for a more permanent location. It makes sense that there would be a street where people could go for weird magic stuff. Less clear is why there's isn't a new magic street. This is the sort of thing that either wink and nudge goes on forever or gets Salem Bright Trialed in a bunch of firey death."

They tuned back into the scrying glass just as Kandomere said. "It may have done with the sudden disappearances of the potential Brights in the area. It may be the same unsub. I will see if I can identify any other sudden disappearances of other potential magic users."

"Did Henutsen say anything about suddenly disappearing Brights?" Felix snapped a quick look at Shosa.

"Mostly she said some vague and unhelpful things about Bast and agreed to pass the petals onto the Cult of Ra. She spoke of Chicago as though it was a living thing, that it didn't want us here." The Red Magic in Shosa, already so close to the surface surged up for a moment in her eyes. "She said nothing about Brights disappearing. We need to contact someone at Headquarters, see if they can't give us some extra insights. If we can't get something by morning we'll divide and conquer. I'll hit the newspaper archive at the library and you can ask people questions."

He didn't like splitting up, it was a good idea though. He pulled into the drive of a small public parking garage, leaning back so that Shosa could reach across to do something Red to the card reader to lift the big wooden thing that blocked their path. It was short work to pull into a parking spot, pop the trunk, and pick a new license plate. 

Shosa leaned her hip against the side of the car, watching him. "You're thinking."

He made a sound of agreement as he unscrewed the bolts. "Why did Chicago stop us from finding Alice's location, but not keep us from communicating? Why didn't it try to push me away when she called to me? Why is it more important to keep us from finding her physical location, but not being with her physically?"

"You think she's not where she is?" Shosa said with a slow care.

"It is a theory I don't want to believe, but honestly I might get over it once I think about it properly. She could be forced into astral projection, it would explain her strength and why she's two places at once."

"Or she could be dead."

"Except she can't be," Felix said. People have been trying since the beginning of magic to resurrect each other. "There's only one spell that can bring someone back from the dead and the Tutelary are the only ones who know it now that the Dark Lord is dead."

"Could he have told someone else?"

Felix's hand flinched. He had finished anyway. Standing up, he busied himself without looking at Shosa.

"Felix, could he have told someone? He lived for a very long time."

"The spell was given to Sargon in a spellbook, you know the rules for this sort of thing," Felix told her. "Out of all the things elves did to our world, the laws of magic remain. One can change minds, history, the landscape of the earth itself, but magic is something else. Something more stubborn than feelings, or time, or atomic bonds. That which is in a spellbook is only known by the one who wrote the spell and the one who reads it. Unless a bunch of Silver Brights manage to miraculously channel the spirit of the dead, the information died with..." He stopped. Swallowed. He had not said the name for centuries. It felt like lead on his tongue. It's poison subtle and vicious. "With the Dark Lord dead no one knows but us."

"I'm sorry, Felix," Shosa told him. "I didn't want to cause you pain."

The plate clanked against the tools in the trunk, the lid clanged shut. "They're valid questions. It makes sense as much as it doesn't. That she's..." He stopped and swallowed.

"Why don't you take a second to yourself? I'm going to call Records to see what they have in the back."

With a hop and a twist, he planted himself on the back of the car. Scrambling waves of feeling rose up inside him, a second spine that had everything to do with emotion. At times his feeling and other people's feelings mixed up so much he didn't know what he was feeling. He pushed away the round and loopy feelings of the folks at the bars, the loneliness that thought it recognized him but hadn't known him for a long time, the familiarity of Shosa's complex knotwork of feelings, an embroidered band he could use to find his way home.

The twin of love was loss. It only made that which was present all the more precious. Take their car. Someone had made their old Boattail. Had sat down and drawn it up and passed it along, someone had done some math to the designs and then molded out pieces of metal. Someone had welded and painted and sent it to a car lot where it had passed hands until it ended up in their grasp. It was just a car, just an object - disposable and alterable - yet it existed no less as a creative act. As a toeing back of the spongy nothingness of despair. Something about this case was cutting through the rope he'd wrapped around himself. "That was an emotional reaction."

"You're an emotional person."

He shot her a look, but she was staring out over the little parking garage. He joined her for a moment. It was so quiet.

"Titus is in Records. He won't be on shift, but he'd look the extra mile." And Titus was always anxious to actually feel like he was doing something active.

When he looked back at her again, Shosa looked away quickly to her scrying glass. By the time he was beside her bearing the triangle on his arm, there was an ogre on the glass looking at them over the top of their bifocals. He seemed to recognize Shosa. "Yes?"

"Hello Tebit. Tutelary Shosa and Felix. We're in Chicago on the mystery Bright case - search and rescue. Our investigation has turned up that a bunch of potential Brights went missing -suspected foul play. There wasn't any information about this in our debriefing. We would like to know any information on missing or unaccounted for Brights in Chicago."

Tebit looked even harder at them over the top of his bifocals. "Chicago?"

"We're aware," Shosa said.

Huffing out a laugh, Tebit pulled out a giant feather and started making notes.

"If you don't have time," Shosa told him, "Titus will look into it for us."

Tebit blinked up at them in surprise. "Oh."

"What?" Felix leaned forward.

The ogre just cleared his throat and turned back down to his notes. "I'll let him know about your request. Will it be safe to scry you back?"

"In twelve hours or so, we're going to be wrangling around a park."

"Have fun then," Tebit nodded at them. "I'll begin the request."


End file.
